When comparing Codecademy vs Coursera, the Slant community recommends Codecademy for most people. In the question“What are the best websites to learn to code?”Codecademy is ranked 4th while Coursera is ranked 13th. The most important reason people chose Codecademy is:

Right from the start, users write code. They start small in an environment that has constant feedback and gradually progress to more complex concepts. Users can see code results instantly, giving great feedback.

Pros

Pro

Interactivity

Right from the start, users write code. They start small in an environment that has constant feedback and gradually progress to more complex concepts. Users can see code results instantly, giving great feedback.

Pro

Excellent progression

Codeacademy doesn't overwhelm beginners with information. It gives bite-sized information, the bare minimum needed to finish a task and get to the next one. As the course progresses, it slowly fills in background information.

Pro

Good editor

Codeacademy has a powerful, beginner-friendly integrated development environment (IDE) that can also be used outside of curriculum.

Pro

Bite-sized lessons

Each lesson in code-academy focuses on a single concept, and repetition is provided to drill the concept.

Pro

High quality courses from well known universities

Many courses offered at Coursera are from well known universities (such as Stanford and Princeton) and instructed by their professors. Often the material taught in the Coursera courses is material from the actual university course.

Pro

You can audit courses for free

Pro

Wide selection of courses

Coursera offers over 1000 courses on a variety of different topics. Courses are offered on learning to code and specific languages, but there is also a large selection of courses that would be beneficial to someone wanting to learn more about computer science as well (algorithms, data science, computer security) and plenty others.

Pro

Courses offered in a variety of languages (with transcriptions available)

Coursera offers courses from all around the world, resulting in courses taught in English, French, Spanish, Chinese, Russian, Turkish and a long list of others. Transcriptions for a large number of languages are offered for each course.

Pro

Some courses offer a verified certificate for a fee

There is an option to earn a verified certificate as proof you completed the course (for use on LinkedIn, resumes etc.). The cost varies between courses, but is generally around $49-$60.

Ad

Cons

Con

Lack of context

Codecademy is great for providing a hands-on approach, but there is a lack of context regarding how to start a project in real life. While users may learn how to code using Codecademy's interface, they may not have any idea how to code independently.

Con

Not the best structure for quick refreshers

The content of the lessons is aimed very much at people just starting to learn how to code. This is perfect for beginners but if you want to use Codecademy to refresh your knowledge the lessons are not designed to be quickly done.

Con

Buggy

Codecademy is known to have many bugs which interfere with the editor, resulting in error messages despite having the correct answer.

Con

Deleted a lot of content

A lot of free content has been taken away, for example the PHP course was removed from the site.

Con

Allows infinite loops to run

If you run an infinite loop, the browser freezes. Many other similar websites will give you an error, preventing the loop from running. Though not a bug, the lack of feature to stop infinite loops from running can be quite frustrating to beginners.

Con

Courses are not always available

Courses are run on set dates, though some courses provide access to the material whether or not the course is running (however, there will be far less student activity in the forums when the course is not running).Some courses only make their material available when the course is running, so you may have to wait a long period (sometimes months) for your course to be offered.

Con

You cannot take the full courses for free

While you used to be able to take courses for free and earn a statement of accomplishment, this is no longer the case. You can only audit the courses if you are not paying. Coursera makes it seem like you should also do the quizzes, but the submit button says "Upgrade to submit".

Alternative Products

Each month, over 2.8 million people use Slant to find the best products and share their knowledge. Pick the tags you’re passionate about to get a personalized feed and begin contributing your knowledge.